An Iowa family had a near miss when a collapsing giant grain bin buried their house under "thousands of bushels of corn", destroying the structure and trapping father and son in the wreckage.
According to the Burlington Hawk Eye, the bin in Hillsboro, Henry County, failed structurally on Tuesday night at around 8pm while Jesse …

I was...

Damn English language

pop?

"Emergency crews quickly deployed a tractor to attempt to lift the remains of the structure and "high-powered blowers" to clear the corn"

were these blowers heated? would have made the evening more pleasant for onlookers to have some popcorn. With the mark-up on popcorn, they could have funded a new home for the family too. 12000 tonnes would be worth more than BillG once popped!

Dangerous

Silos and similar storage tanks have featured prominently on the Discovery Channel lately, but only in doccies with titles like "World's Greatest Engineering Screw-Ups" or "Things That Broke and Killed People".

Clearly the damned things are dangerous, whether they contain giga-litres of fuel, or something as innocuos as molasses or corn. Plonking one within spitting distance from a residence is just *asking* to get yourself sued!

Where was the Risk Evaluation? The Environment Impact Study? The legal department saying "Are you bloody crazy?!?!?"

Houses and industry

While we have a different system here to control such things, it used to be that you could have an industrial site, with a large ventilation fan on a grain store, making a lot of noise, and people could get planning permission for a hour six inches from the store wall.

It's like the way councils will give you planning for a house on a floodplain.

Trouble is, unlike the floodplain the householder could then complain about the noise.

12000 tonnes is also a fair bit of traffic on and off the site--maybe there's a rail line as well--and 12000 tonnes in one batch sounds dodgy for all sorts of reasons: storage management, structural, vermin control, and handling.

But I've seen harvested grain in America just piled in a heap in the open air. You want cheap food, you'll ebd up with rat-piss and seagull-crap.